Symbian 3 to go open source
04-02-2010
Move aimed at preserving its market share in smartphone OS
After holding off for years, the Symbian crowd have at last bowed to the open source movement. The Symbian Foundation is officially making available as open source code the Symbian version 3 smartphone operating system.
Symbian will be available online starting February 4 under an Eclipse Public License. The license allows developers to modify and distribute the code without requiring any licensing on the resulting commercial software.
Symbian has the broadest use of any smartphone OS, but trails the Google Android environment by more than a year in being available as open source. In fact, market analyst Forward Concepts estimates Symbian will see a fall in its market share from 43 to 38 percent in the next five years. It sees competition heating up with the Apple iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Research in Motion, Palm Pre environments and others. Even Samsung has brought out an OS.
"Although Symbian will clearly drop in market share in the high-end smartphone market, it is well positioned in the mid-range and entry-level smartphone segments that are both poised to grow," said Satish Menon, who tracks the sector for Forward Concepts.
Symbian enjoys strong support from DoCoMo and Japanese smartphone makers in addition to its traditional base with Nokia and others, he added
Handset makers are releasing Symbian version 2 devices now, according to Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. Version 3 handsets are expected to follow starting late this year. Nokia, Fujitsu, Samsung, Sharp and Sony Ericsson use Symbian today.
Developers have created tens of thousands of Symbian applications, Berkin said. However, they are available across a fragmented set of application stores run by different carriers and handset makers. Symbian has created a digital certificate program for signing apps as a way to provide a central resource about what apps are available.
"We're enabling other app stores, but Symbian will not have its own app store," he said. Version 3 sports several new features including support for HDMI output, a more efficient memory management scheme and a new 2-D and 3-D graphics architecture. It also enables links to the Internet with a single click, multiple instances of an app to run in parallel and a means of recognizing a song played over the radio so it can be purchased in a music store.
The new code has the same recommended hardware requirements as the previous version. Version 3 can run in 128 Mbytes RAM and can run on an ARM11-class processor.
After holding off for years, the Symbian crowd have at last bowed to the open source movement. The Symbian Foundation is officially making available as open source code the Symbian version 3 smartphone operating system.
Symbian will be available online starting February 4 under an Eclipse Public License. The license allows developers to modify and distribute the code without requiring any licensing on the resulting commercial software.
Symbian has the broadest use of any smartphone OS, but trails the Google Android environment by more than a year in being available as open source. In fact, market analyst Forward Concepts estimates Symbian will see a fall in its market share from 43 to 38 percent in the next five years. It sees competition heating up with the Apple iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Research in Motion, Palm Pre environments and others. Even Samsung has brought out an OS.
"Although Symbian will clearly drop in market share in the high-end smartphone market, it is well positioned in the mid-range and entry-level smartphone segments that are both poised to grow," said Satish Menon, who tracks the sector for Forward Concepts.
Symbian enjoys strong support from DoCoMo and Japanese smartphone makers in addition to its traditional base with Nokia and others, he added
Handset makers are releasing Symbian version 2 devices now, according to Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. Version 3 handsets are expected to follow starting late this year. Nokia, Fujitsu, Samsung, Sharp and Sony Ericsson use Symbian today.
Developers have created tens of thousands of Symbian applications, Berkin said. However, they are available across a fragmented set of application stores run by different carriers and handset makers. Symbian has created a digital certificate program for signing apps as a way to provide a central resource about what apps are available.
"We're enabling other app stores, but Symbian will not have its own app store," he said. Version 3 sports several new features including support for HDMI output, a more efficient memory management scheme and a new 2-D and 3-D graphics architecture. It also enables links to the Internet with a single click, multiple instances of an app to run in parallel and a means of recognizing a song played over the radio so it can be purchased in a music store.
The new code has the same recommended hardware requirements as the previous version. Version 3 can run in 128 Mbytes RAM and can run on an ARM11-class processor.
